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teries, as well as the growing commerce at this time. New routes were created during the Renaissance to accommodate an important demographic expansion, the increased mobility of people, the growth of commercial exchanges, and their shift from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic. The most important development in the history of roads during the seventeenth century was the increased participation of the state in road building. It was a time, too, of the emergence of an urban culture: Livet observes, for example, that at a time when the linguistic unity of Europe was disappearing and nationalism was on the rise, the construction and expansion of new roads were important elements promoting European unity as well as disseminating information and cultural production. Developments in the second half of the eighteenth century establish a foundation for a radical transformation of road construction and transportation facilities that would occur during the following century. Among these are a rise in the importance and number of urban agglomerations; a significant growth in the European population; the beginning of an industrial revolution in England; the increased importance of engineers as agents of road planning and construction; technological improvements in road paving; and the emergence of national land and water routes as expressions of state power, as in Roman times. The eighteenth century also witnessed a cultural transformation of sorts in which an increasing number of people wished to travel, and guide books became increasingly important and plentiful. It was during the nineteenth century, however, that Europe, led by England and France, experienced a profound revolution in road and waterway travel and transport facilities. This consisted of the application of mechanical power to the means of transportation in the form of a steam-driven railroad, which came to replace horse-drawn vehicles, and also the advent of steam ships. The railroad especially created new conditions in European life: "it tended to modify, by its very existence, the connections between people and the activity of cities and the countryside" (p. 66). One early consequence was the rise in the power of urban centers affected by rail travel and the related depopulation of the countryside. The railroad also facilitated national and international contacts, and rail travel attracted the general populace, capitalists, and the state. While Livet's book is important and useful, it does have a major deficiency. Livet's comprehensive treatment of roads and transportation over a broad time period and different national spaces results in a certain superficiality when dealing with any one state at any one particular time. To take one example, that of railway building, Frangois Caron has shown that the Saint-Simonian writings played a critical role in the emergence of a powerful lobby of intellectuals, engineers, and capitalists favoring rail transportation (Francois Caron, Histoire des chemins de fer en France [1997]). Livet acknowledges the influential role Saint-
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Simonians played in the eventual construction of a railway network in France with no real explanation of what this means. Specialists in national histories other than France will undoubtedly find similar gaps in the text. The value of Livet's book, however, lies precisely in its encyclopedic coverage of the history of roads and public transport. As such, it is an important reference and guide to further more specialized research. NICHOLAS PAPAYANIS
Emeritus Brooklyn College, City University of New York MoRDECHAi FEINGOLD, editor. Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters. (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology.) Cambridge: MIT Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 483. $50.00. About twenty-five years ago, historians of science who were not Jesuits discovered that the Society of Jesus contributed more to the Scientific Revolution than opposition to Galileo Galilei. The book under review (together with its companion volume, also edited by Mordechai Feingold, The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives [2003]) is a showcase and, with its rich citations to the literature, also an inventory of the current state of scholarship. Although several of Feingold's contributors claim a novelty for their subjects that overlooks the pioneering work of Jesuit savants like Frangois de Dainville and the coverage of the Archivum historicum Societatis Jesu (whose first number, published in 1932, carried an article on the mathematician Angelo Secchi, S.J.), the interest and breadth of their essays mitigates their sin. In addition to a long article by the editor, the book contains articles on the academy of mathematics at the Roman College by Ugo Baldini; Galileo's Jesuit connections (William Wallace); seventeenth-century Jesuit versions of Aristotelian cosmology (Edward Grant); Rene Descartes and the Jesuits (Roger Ariew); G. B. Riccioli (Alfredo Dinis); Athanasius Kircher and his museum (Paula Findlen); external patronage of Jesuit publishing (Martha Baldwin); Jesuit teaching of science in early modern Spain (Victor Navarro) and in the Spanish Netherlands (G. H. W. Vanpaemel); and Jesuit collaboration in the Storia letteraria d'ltalia, a journal that ran from 1750 to 1758 (Brendan Dooley). The articles by Feingold and Findlen raise the largest questions. Feingold complains that ill-informed people have interpreted unfairly the "inability [of Jesuit scientists] to measure up to the likes of Galileo, Descartes, or Newton . . . as something akin to moral failure" (p. 5). Do not blame the scientists for the shortfall, says Feingold, but the Jesuit hierarchy. "Young Jesuits desperate to secure opportunities to devote themselves to scientific studies" were thwarted by their superiors (p. 12). That judgment, too, is unfair. In his sympathy for Jesuit savants, Feingold loses sight of the cardinal fact that they were priests who chose to join a particularly authoritarian company.
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Europe: Early Modem and Modern Writing originally on mathematics and natural philosophy, and thereby risking the society's reputation for sound learning, had a far lower priority among them than missionary work, teaching, and cultivating ties with influential people. They condoned and sometimes supported scholarly work if in service to teaching, but not if in service to self and science. The Jesuits had more schools and students and professors than the rest of Catholic Europe put together; they trained many who led the Scientific Revolution; but while they could educate a Descartes, none of them could be one. Feingold knits together his many examples of Jesuits who contributed a fact or theorem or textbook with a concept that further obscures the corporate mission of the old Society of Jesus. It is "practitioner," sometimes "Jesuit practitioner," the practice being mathematics or natural philosophy. The term had currency during the Scientific Revolution in the form of "mathematical practitioner," which designated an Englishman who was to mathematics what a barber-surgeon was to medicine. As appears from the definitions and examples in E. G. R. Taylor's The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England (1954), these men taught navigation, business mathematics, and surveying, made mathematical instruments, and wrote textbooks for money; they were tradesmen, not savants. Jesuits occasionally played the part of mathematical practitioners, for example, in designing instruments, but they did so typically within their teaching function. Such performances qualified them as mathematical practitioners as little as grinding telescope lenses made Isaac Newton an artisan. Rather, from around 1600 the mathematicians at the Jesuits' main teaching establishment, the Roman College, sought to upgrade the status of the subject so as to bear on philosophy; they did not regard themselves as practitioners but as teachers and synthesizers who might chance to make a discovery. This was the view and program of Christopher Clavius, the founder of a "mathematical academy" at the Roman College for Jesuits with an aptitude for mathematics. Baldini's judicious and well documented article places this academy, which ended its formal existence shortly after Clavius's death in 1612, within the framework of Jesuit purpose and policy. He stresses the importance of its library, its graduates, and its contributions to the formation of missionaries to China—that is, its pedagogical work. If "practitioner" fails to indicate the epistemological status of mathematics claimed by Jesuits who were mathematicians, it misleads even more when applied to Jesuits who were natural philosophers. People who inquired into the natural world did not "practice" anything; they were savants, not dentists. From the notion of practitioners of natural philosophy it is an easy step to another inapt anachronism: "scientific community." "Few practitioners," Feingold writes, "considered the unequivocal commitment to a 'modern' world view to be a sine qua non for inclusion in the scientific community" (p. 36). Here "practitioner" is a
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stand-in for "scientist," which historians of science recognize as an anachronism when applied to the seventeenth century. Something important is at stake. Thomas Kuhn employs "practitioner" in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to paper over cracks in his claim that one model of change in natural knowledge fits all times. Athanasius Kircher combined many qualities prized by the Jesuits in a form at odds with their doctrine that the society should stay close to established and reputable knowledge. A teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at the Roman College, Kircher knew several oriental languages and was thought to possess the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He invented instruments; did experiments; designed and performed natural magic; recovered the blueprints of Noah's ark; described the lives of people who lived beneath the surface of the earth; ascended, perhaps only in imagination, through the heavens to view the motions of the planets; published large lavish volumes on all respectable knowledge; and formed a "museum," housed in the Roman College, that contained artifacts and natural curiosities illustrative of his wide interests. At the threshold of the museum, two Egyptian obelisks welcomed visitors, among whom figured the great Catholic catch Christina, the formerly Lutheran former Queen of Sweden. Findlen builds these shafts, collections, and visitors into a structure as impressive and as implausible as Kircher's Noachian architecture. "The museum was a theater that captured all drama of baroque Rome, and Kircher was the director who cast Christina as his heroine and [her friend Pope] Alexander VII as the hero of the play" (p. 238). They were the "living embodiments of the statues of Minerva and Isis [once a cow, perhaps, but never a pope] displayed in the corridors of the museum" (p. 233). These wonders were as nothing compared with the collection's potential for the conversion of unbelievers. "Kircher's museum demonstrated [!] the Church's and the Society's ability to reconstitute the Christian imperium" (p. 228). "The possession of the obelisks in Rome, and the knowledge they contained, became the philosophical equivalent of the battle for souls being conducted throughout the world" (p. 238). According to Findlen, the Roman Catholic priest Kircher rated the wisdom of Hermes over the revelation of Christ. "For Kircher, the obelisks, and the hieroglyphics drawn on them, represented the purest form of truth" (p. 236). These assertions rest on vague resemblances of the sort that gave Kircher the idea of a clock powered by a sunflower seed. No doubt the phenomenon that was Kircher needs explanation. Contemporaries who admired his erudition often mocked his gullibility. That deepened the mystery. Why did Kircher's superiors tolerate and even promote his activities? Baldwin provides material for an answer. Big illustrated books were costly to produce, the Jesuits ordinarily sought patrons to pay for them, and Kircher had a genius for attracting patrons.
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The arrangement benefited all concerned. The Jesuits thereby tied themselves more tightly to the rich and powerful; Kircher's most faithful supporters besides Christina were princes of the Holy Roman Empire. Patrons received a dedication praising their mind, valor, and family. Authors had the satisfaction of seeing themselves in print and also, in proportion to the power of the patron, a means to circumvent the Jesuits' internal censorship. Baldwin rightly emphasizes that Kircher and his followers cultivated experiments, games, and natural magic to interest a courtly audience, and that the society did not intend that its members cultivate natural philosophy as an end in itself. Constraint of space allows only two words about the other articles in Feingold's collection. They are all useful, especially Navarro's, and also solid, with the exception of Dooley's. An indication of Dooley's negligence; he makes Giacinto De Cristoforo a "famous Jesuit... who had persecuted the atomists" (p. 436) in Naples in the 1690s, whereas De Cristoforo, no Jesuit, was the main victim of the affair. He credits Gottfried Leibniz with the oxymoronic concept of centrifugal force of a body at rest and botches bits of geometry, geodesy, and optics, a chrestomathy that omits minor blemishes like "Sebastiano Bartoli" for Daniello of that ilk (p. 448). Where was the editor?
Principe. Their chronicle of Starkey's vigils and labors brings fascinating new insight into the practice of (al)chemistry (or "chymistry," as the authors term the inseparable disciplines of alchemy and chemistry in the early modern period). In the last two decades, such accounts of the pursuit of natural knowledge, especially of hands-on disciplines like chemistry and medical practice, have reconfigured our understanding of the transformation in attitudes toward nature that we call the Scientific Revolution. That the colonist Starkey became one of England's most sought after chymical practitioners seems at first surprising, but Starkey's interests were fostered by his access to the latest metallurgical techniques in the nascent Massachusetts' iron industry and to chymical lessons—with an informally educated but chymically talented ironworker—which appear to have combined seamlessly with Starkey's medical practice. Perhaps the entrepreneurial experimentation and the more fluid social mixing of the colonies provided an arena for the development of such technological expertise. In any event, Starkey employed his "scholastic" Harvard education, steeped in logical analysis and disputation, in his careful experimentation in the laboratory. Indeed, the most innovative section of Newman's and Principe's account details how Starkey employed the formalized methods of scholastic inquiry and argumentation in the practices of experimental philosophy. This is J. L. HEILBRON possible because Starkey's laboratory notebooks still Worcester College, University of Oxford survive, and the authors' deciphering of his actual alchemical practices from these notebooks is brilliant scholarship, combining their deep knowledge of chemWILLIAM R . NEWMAN and LAWRENCE M . PRINCIPE. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of ical texts, debates, and concerns with a very rare Helmontian Chymistry. Chicago: University of Chicago understanding of actual laboratory practice. Newman and Principe draw a host of remarkable conclusions to Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 344. $40.00. demonstrate persuasively that Starkey's practices in On Monday, September 20, 1648, the Bermuda-born the laboratory were clearly informed by theoretical Massachusetts alchemist George Starkey exulted: concerns, that his procedures tested his theories, and "From the year 1647 to this very year and day, I have that he employed precise quantitative methods. All exerted myself in the search for the liquor alkahest these characteristics of "modern" chemistry are found with many studies, vigils, labors, and costs. Today for in Starkey's quite clearly alchemical pursuit of a transthe first time it has been granted and conceded to my formative agent, the Philosophical Mercury, and a unworthy self by the highest Father of Lights, the best powerful solvent, the universal Alkahest. Along the and greatest God, to attain complete knowledge of it way, the authors also give insight into Starkey's attiand to see its final end. To Him let there be eternal tude to textual authority, the encoding and decoding of alchemical authors, and the place of divine authority in praise both now and forever. Amen" (p. 201). Two years later, this Harvard graduate set sail from the laboratory. Newman and Principe's book is one of the most Boston to London where he hoped to have better access to glassware, implements, chemicals, and books. significant to appear recently in the history of chemisStarkey's reputation as a skilled operator in chymistry try. It argues for a continuous development from the preceded him and, once in London, he very quickly practices and theories of medieval alchemy up through entered the circle around the German emigre intelli- eighteenth-century chemistry, including continuity begencer Samuel Hartlib. There he came into contact tween seventeenth-century chymical practice and the with Robert Boyle, who was then a chemical novice but "new" eighteenth-century chemistry of Antoine is now sometimes called the "father of chemistry" and Lavoisier, which has always been regarded as an considered a central figure in the Scientific Revolution almost total break with the chemistry of the preceding for his efforts to deploy chemistry in the service of a centuries. The authors show convincingly that Lavoisier's celebrated quantitative analysis emerges out of mechanical natural philosophy. This is an important book by two leading historians centuries-old chymical practices rather than being of chemistry, William R. Newman and Lawrence M. borrowed from mechanical physics. They demonstrate
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